This happened in my art class once. Our kooky art teacher invited an ex-student in without any prior warning and we were supposed to ask him questions on his art (he did book covers).
Silence, no one was having this shit. Out of pity I asked him questions on some tiny details I noticed on the spot. More silence, I ask about different tiny details. And so forth.
Iâve realised that thereâs a large portion of the populace that are perfectly comfortable in excruciating silence if itâs not at their expense.
Just imagine this with the books I had to read in school. Yes, I would have read it, Iâm a fast reader, so a bad book does not waste too much time. On the other hand, I would have no problems with grilling the author over the shit he or she wrote. Because basically every book we had to read for school was crap. There are so many good books, books that would spark interest and passion for reading more, but somehow they had selected the worst of the worst back then, aimed at making children reel in horror when they see books and vow never to touch a book again after school.
Worth, 1000x over.
Ugh, can relate. I love to read; I used to go through two books per week as a kid during middle school and high school. Not even just fiction, but non-fiction about topics that interested me like space and aviation. I even read books on my Palm Pilot PDA, well before e-readers were a thing.
So as you can imagine, I had an exceptional vocabulary compared to classmates. This had some annoying effects as well. Whenever I did written assignments for a new class with a different teacher, theyâd always accuse me of either cheating or plagiarism. Because I was using way more âdifficult wordsâ than classmates. A two minute conversation usually cleared it up; they quickly found out that I did in fact do the work and understood the assignment.
I donât envy teachers today. Reading comprehension has declined sharply, and kids just donât like to read as much as they did when I was young. Despite the fact that books are now way more accessible to them. I fear itâs going to result in an illiterate generationâŚ
I read everything I could get my hands on (and still do), except the shit they assigned us for school.
I get âhistorically relevantâ classics are a thing, but students donât want to read most of them because theyâre brutally formal and none of them can relate to them. Itâs a chore primarily because the curriculum is all old and because burying 500 layers of symbolism into a story isnât how people write any more (because it sucks).
If more reading assignments were stories written to actually entertain kids and just asking the kids to put themselves in the characterâs shoes and âwhat would you doâ, maybe they wouldnât hate reading so much.
At some point I started dialing up the symbolism interpretation up to 11 but somehow they didnât like that either. I came to the conclusion that they want you to validate their particular interpretation of a work even if it put too much thought into it compared to the author, not put too much thought into it yourself.
Middle School sucks ass for everyone whoâs not a rich kid.